Small Night Projects: featured in “Print Out” (curated by Paul McAree) at Carthage Hall Lismore as part of the Lismore Castle Arts Programme, 25 April – 14 June, where we will present a set of 8 A2 screen-printed artist posters featuring work by Marian Balfe, Fiona Banner, Husk Bennett, Noel Hensey, Mark Leckey, Asha Murray, David Sherry and Philipp Timischl. The limited edition posters (30 print run) are for sale at €15 each. All proceeds from sales go back to artists.
For this, what we call our 5th Issue after 4 successive text-based publications (TONE, TOLD, TEXT, TEXT), and the first Small Night printed project of 2026, the four editors — Laura Fitzgerald, Chris Steenson, Alan Phelan and James Merrigan — each invited two artists to produce new A2 screen-printed posters combining text and image. Up to now, our editorial focus has largely centred on text itself: text as artwork, text as document, text as proposition, text as image. Image has appeared occasionally, but mostly as an exception rather than the rule.
Text, for us, has often operated without metaphor, closer perhaps to what today circulates as the meme, but without necessarily relying on the image. For this project however, we deliberately asked artists to bring image and text together.
Part of this comes from thinking about something Lawrence Weiner said about language. In his work, words are not descriptions of materials, they are the materials. “Light”, “waves”, “froth”: these are not metaphors but sculptural elements. Language becomes object rather than representation.
Where images often anchor meaning, sometimes even closing it down by directing us too firmly toward the artist’s point of view, text can remain more open. It can suggest without fixing. It can circulate as an idea rather than as a single visual authority that solicits or seduces our attention with one hit. This project tests what happens when these two conditions meet: when image risks metaphor and text resists it.
We chose the poster form deliberately. The poster carries something of the music scene: its DIY ethos, its self-organising energy, its ability to mobilise quickly and collectively. Visual art often remains structured around the individual studio practitioner, making self-organisation harder to sustain. The poster, by contrast, implies distribution, circulation and community.
Many of the works also carry a quiet undertow of mortality. Noel Hensey’s Nokia dumb phone displaying the word DEATH. Marian Balfe’s FUNERAL signpost. These are not simply images but signals, reminders perhaps of precarity, of endings, of the unstable conditions within which artist-led activity now operates.
The marriage of text and image also brings subjectivity into the poster plane. Fiona Banner’s installation image of her text sculpture “Vulva Volvo” captures the feet of a first-person-shooter; Husk Bennett’s creepy good anthropomorphic “CAT” claims what it is, and not is, as text and image; Asha Murray’s pangea of New Grange and Teletubbies decries the “TRUTH” with a laugh; David Sherry’s upright wall-wearing traveler with red sash portrays physical fortitude under the weight of mental burden; Philipp Timischl’s extruded “PERHAPS RATIONAL ACTIONS DON’T APPLY” with repeated snapshots of protest at Place de la République monument in Paris intimates a DIY alternative in the wake of political and institutional impotence; and Mark Leckey’s…
Small Night Projects continues to explore how self-organisation might function in an increasingly volatile cultural landscape, particularly as rising costs and rents make independent activity more fragile. This project is one small attempt to build supportive micro-economies within that reality.
All proceeds from poster sales will go directly to the artists. This is made possible thanks to the generous support of Lismore Castle Arts via the Arts Council, who have funded production, artist fees and travel. Their support allows the project to function as both exhibition and redistribution model.
The posters are:
– A2
– Screen-printed
– Limited edition (40 print run)
– 170gsm Munken Rough paper
– €15 each
– Eight artists, eight posters
This is our first project of 2026. We hope it marks a continuation of Small Night Projects as an editorial platform, a production framework, and a small but persistent DIY publishing ecology.
Please come along.
